Re: [computer-go] Mertin's private 9×9 & 19×19 tournament

[Stefan Mertin]

> From: Nick Wedd <nick <at> maproom.co.uk>
> Subject: Re: [computer-go] Mertin's private 9×9 & 19×19 tournament
> Date: 2007-10-09 10:28:38 GMT 
> > Edward de Grijs <grey.matter <at> hotmail.com> writes
> > Hello all,
> > is something known about this tournament yet? In
> > http://www.computer-go.info/events/future.html
> > is stated that this tournament would take place this year
> > in Germany, but so far no news.
> > Does somebody have more information?
> 
> This is Stefan Mertin.  He runs tournaments by getting copies of 
> go-playing programs and playing them against each other.  He has told me 
> of his plans to run one this year, but he may have decided that with 
> CGOS working so well, it would be superfluous.  He has posted to this 
> list, so let's hope he sees this thread.
> Nick

YES! 
It´s me - Stefan Mertin in Osnabrueck, Germany

I am very happy about the great succes of Don Daileys Computer GO Server
although with it my own private tournaments have become by far less important
but my home PC is still running (nearly night and day!) playing new games 
between all the Go programs I have - So I hope to present first results still this year!


I started playing "private" tournaments on my home PC
in 2000 with a first 9x9 contest of all the Go-programs I could get for it - 
Nick Wedd published the results on the Go sites at the BGA.


Then from 2002 to 2005 I played a new huge 13x13 tournament
with at the end 25 programs and nearly 1000 games played - 
results and games are still here: 
http://www.geocities.com/comp_go/13x13.html

Winner was  Go++  (prototype of what later was available as Go++4.0)  by Nick Reiss
Second was  GoeMate  (a last tournament-version of 2001)  by Chen Zhixing
Third was the newest  GnuGo version of that time  3.2  playing on level 15
and fourth was  ManyFaces (v.10.2 shortly before v.11.0)  by David Fotland
together with  GoProfessional-III, an earlier commercial version of Go++

here is a complete result-list of all the participants:

rank  program        status version   year   author                 country
-------------------  ---------------------   ------------------------------
01. GO PROF.(GO4++)   x    beta72 Aug.2001   Dr. Michael Reiss      England
02. GOEMATE           x,c:jap     Apr.2001   Prof. Chen, Zhixing      China
03. GNU-GO            f    v3.2lev15  2002   FSF(D.Bump +div.) Intern at ional
04. GO PROFESSIONAL   c    vIII       1999   Dr. Michael Reiss      England
04. MANY FACES OF GO  x,c  v10.2      2001   David Fotland              USA
06. GO-AHEAD          x    v4.2       2001   Dr. Peter Woitke       Germany
07. HANDTALK          c    v99.04 (98.10E)   Prof. Chen, Zhixing      China
07. WINHONTE          f    v0.94      2003   Fredrik A. Dahl         Norway
07. WULU              c,d  v2.38      2001   Lei Xiuyu & Wulu-Team    China
10. GO INTELLECT      x    v10.0Win   1998   Prof. Ken Chen             USA
11. DARIUSH           x    v2.6.8.2   2002   E.Marchand + F.Boissac  France
12. GNU-GO            f    v3.0   Aug.2001   FSF(D.Bump +div.) Intern at ional
13. GOLIATH           c,d  v3.5       1996   Mark Boon          Netherlands
14. KATSUNARI         d,x  v8.0   Aug.2001   Sei, Shinichi            Japan
15. STAR OF POLAND    c?   v6.0       1993   Janusz Kraszek          Poland
15. AYA               f    v4.65      2001   Hiroshi Yamashita        Japan
17. EGO               c,d  samurai    1995   Bruce Wilcox            Hawaii
18. EXPLORER          f    v3.3(Mac)  1995   Martin Müller   Austria-CH-USA
19. SMARTGO           x,c  v1.0.1     2002   Anders Kierulf             USA
20. INDIGO            x,f        Sept.2001   Dr. Bruno Bouzy         France
20. GOLOIS            x,c  v1.0       2001   Dr. Tristan Cazenave    France
22. GO-STAR           x    v4.0   Aug.2001   Jimmy Lu (Lu Jinqiang)   China
22. PROGO             ?    v1.4       1991   Robert Rehm        Netherlands
24. TS-GO             x    v9.3       2001   Ivo Tonkes         Netherlands
24. TURBO-GO          s    v5.0       2000   Arnoud v.d. Loeff  Netherlands

(f=free; s=shareware; d=demo free; c=commercial; x=tourn./experimental version)


In 2007 I now first started playing hundreds of games on the big board 19x19
including Go++5.0 / GoeMate2001 / FunGo2000 / ManyFaces11.0 and GoAhead5.2

but then I changed again to the small board 9x9 
and I hope to finish soon a first set of rounds 
and want to publish the results and all the 9x9 games played so far between 
these programs: 

ManyFacesOfGo v.11.0
Go Intellect v.10
WinHonte v.2.01
Go++ v.5.0
GoeMate 2001
GnuGo v3.6 level 15
Aya v5.99
CrazyStone0005
and Suzie v0.26

This will be nearly round robin with 150 games each pairing.
Next perhaps SmartGo 2.7 and Dariush 5.2 may be included
(then without playing each other program)
and of course MoGo - but all the above participating programs
are older versions and I think it could be most interesting to 
include newer versions of most of them to see the progress
and I hope very much on all the programmers to tell me,
which newer version of their software I should let play again...

I restarted my tournaments this year because I have now
a possibility to play games automatically between different 
Go programs running on one PC without using GTP or GMP
so that older Go software like FunGo can be paired with newer
Go playing programs that run on Windows (Linux is not yet included).
Interfaces like GoGui or DraGo are a big help for that!

A time consuming problem that still has to be solved is finding
the correct result of all the games played. Until now I have an
automatically generated result based on the evaluation of GnuGo
and sometimes I should check all these with some help of SmartGo -
but as there are so many games played, this problem
luckily does not affect the results in a way worth mentioning.

My plans are to continue these tournaments for 9x9 and 19x19
over the years, publishing results monthly
and to include as many programs and newer versions
of the programs as possible and let play handicap games as well.


Stefan